While this paper is about catering and cleaning workers in a university environment, it refers specifically to the experience of the women doing this work in Trinity College Dublin. Much of their work and conditions is relevant to similar workers in other higher education institutions and in Ireland generally. The paper is based primarily on the observations of fellow workers in both the catering and cleaning areas of Trinity.
Women are a majority in catering and cleaning jobs throughout Ireland, most of which are part-time and low-paid. Universities have done nothing to improve the bad conditions usually endured by women in these jobs and frequently use the excuse that they are paying "the going rate for the work". The fact is that the women in both the catering and cleaning areas, at the highest point of the scale, are paid less than the male general operatives. Catering and cleaning staff do not have the protection of relativity with other areas of the public service unlike salaried staff and manual and security staff.
Trinity College is a direct employer of its catering and cleaning workers, whereas most of the other third level institutions have gone the way of contracting out these areas. Getting a permanent job in Trinity, even on a part-time basis, gives the women a sense of security, although they resent what they see as easier access for men to better contracts of employment. There is certainly a strong element of truth in this perception and I will discuss it in relation to both catering and cleaning jobs.
The catering industry has a tradition of bad pay and conditions and negotiations to improve the terms for catering workers in universities have been hampered by the recognition that, poorly as they are paid, they are marginally better off than their counterparts elsewhere. The Labour Court's Employment Regulation Order [1] for catering workers sets the full weekly rate for a general worker (which is the equivalent of the Catering Assistant grade in Trinity) at £149.13, compared to a weekly rate of £155.62 at the lowest point of the Catering Assistant scale, which still only rises to £173.71 at the highest point.
In the catering areas in Trinity, all term-workers, those taken on for a specific period to whom the employer has little or no obligation, are women. Term-workers in catering are literally that - they are employed for the academic year and there is no guarantee that they will be given work during the college vacation or that they will be called back the following year. While this suits some women, with responsibilities to children and families, it still means that they are effectively working with no rights at all. The broken service means that women may have difficulty claiming such a basic right as maternity leave. There are no male term workers, they are all either permanent or on minimum one-year contracts. No justification for this situation has ever been offered. In fact, there are two chefs in the Catering Department at the moment, a man and a women, who have the same training and the same years of experience. When a vacancy for a promotion arose, the Catering Manager promoted the man, justifying his decision on the grounds that he "thought he would be better.” When the Union protested on the woman's behalf, she was told that her wages would be raised to equal the man's. That was in April 1995 and in September 1995 she has still not received the extra money.
The College ensures that there will be at least a four-month gap between successive contracts. In May 1995, they tried to get the women to agree a contract which stated in writing that they would not be considered for employment in Trinity College after the academic year of 1995-96. The Catering Managers were prepared to say verbally that the workers would probably be taken back, as in previous years, but refused to put in writing anything that might give the women protection under the Unfair Dismissals Act.
Problems for "low status" workers
The value of work has generally been based on the socially defined status of the person performing the work rather than the economic worth of the output. The low status accorded to catering workers is reflected in the terms of employment. Although there is not actual discrimination in the work that is done, men will generally be assigned to any heavy lifting and there are no women drivers. Hours in the catering area can be quite unsocial and a shift system is usually operated. The unsocial hours for both catering and cleaning workers are becoming even more of a problem as the student body grows. The College management are increasingly extending the hours of opening of buildings and services and have attempted to extend the working hours of the workers accordingly. This is particularly difficult for the cleaners, many of whom already have to arrange minibus transport because they start work too early for public transport to be available to them. There is also a concern about personal security as women are coming into the largely deserted College grounds in the very early mornings.
Catering workers in Trinity College have to deal with the additional complication of student labour, which has been used on occasion to the disadvantage of the ordinary staff. In previous centuries, College scholarships included an obligation on the student to serve at table in Commons. Present-day scholarship recipients only have to say Grace but waiting jobs are a much sought-after means of supplementing student incomes and they are advertised through the Students' Union or through private arrangements with catering management. Students working in the catering area are paid at the same hourly rate as the regular staff and they generally get the vacation work which is freed by the absence of the term workers. The College has no obligation in terms of pension or other rights so the students are an economically attractive labour force, particularly in times when educational institutions are being told to tighten their belts. The students and the regular staff have worked very well together in the past but as recently as last summer, the College used student labour to do the work of catering workers who were on strike. The strike was called to further the demand for pension rights for part-time workers in Trinity, all of whom are women. The students not only replaced the striking workers but they were offered the additional incentive of free rooms in the College so that they would be on call when needed.
Most of the women working in the catering area left school relatively early and do not feel they have much choice in the sort of work they can do. Some of them had worked in other low paid jobs, most frequently in shops, and were extremely dissatisfied with pay and conditions. The lowest grade is that of Catering Assistant, which is seen as unskilled work and it is mainly filled by women who are employed on a casual basis, although there are also permanent and temporary male Catering Assistants. Not only is part-time and casual work less well paid than full-time and permanent, it also rarely qualifies for protection under employment legislation. There are not many opportunities for promotion from the Catering Assistant grade, even for permanent employees, without extending the worker's skills through training or further education. Experience (sometimes of many years) does not seem to count for much, although many of the term-workers have been asked to return many times. Even the chefs, who have undertaken several years of training, are badly paid. Supervisors have usually done courses in Catering and Management colleges such as Cathal Brugha Street and have never been appointed from the ranks of the Catering Assistants. The highest position to which a catering assistant can expect to aspire is Chargehand and no training has ever been given for this supervisory role. There has only been one person in recent years who benefited from on-the-job training and he was not a women.
In a time of increasing unemployment and casualisation, many women are not endowed with equality of opportunity when it comes to jobs. It is ironic that the majority of university staff are the lower paid workers who have had restricted access to education themselves and whose children are unlikely to enjoy the benefits of coming to university as students. Many of the women with whom working conditions were discussed believe that higher education for their children would be far beyond their means, despite the expected abolition of fees. Fee remission has also been restricted to full-time workers and the majority of the women in the catering and the cleaning areas have been part-time. The women's experience has taught them that there is no guaranteed relationship between the level of education and wages after leaving school. They are concerned about the employment situation in Ireland and worry about their children's future. None of them would like either their sons or daughters to be doing the same kind of work as they do themselves but agreed that a poorly paid job was better than no job.
A significant number of the women employed in the catering and cleaning areas of Trinity, and this is probably true of the other universities, come from generations in which girls were still educated differently from boys, in the expectation that as wives and mothers, they were unlikely to need long-term employable skills. These expectations were shared by school authorities, parents and the women themselves and they are reflected in the attitude of many of the women to their work, in that they are prepared to put up with bad conditions because they welcome the chance to work hours that fit in around family commitments, despite the fact that the real beneficiary is the employer. Government policy that places increased reliance on the service sector as the source of future job creation exacerbates this situation as employers are encouraged to provide more and more "yellow pack" jobs simply to decrease the numbers on the unemployment register.
Many of the women in the catering and cleaning areas take these jobs because they fit in with family commitments. Many of them start early in the morning and return home early to look after their children. This is another area in which they are disadvantaged in terms of other university staff. Because of their low wages, they are unable to afford the child-care facilities provided by the College - there is a charge of £55 per week per child. The nursery hours are also geared to the standard 9-5 day which does not help women whose working day starts at 7 a.m. In the absence of state funded nursery facilities, they must rely on family or friends to look after their children or take the sort of jobs which will fit in with their domestic arrangements.
While nobody gets tax relief for childcare expenses, this is a particular burden on lower paid women. Article 41 of the Constitution provides that the State shall endeavour to ensure that mothers should not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home. Despite the fact that many mothers are driven by economic circumstances to work outside the home, the potential of this Article for grounding a claim by a mother to financial assistance from the State has not yet been explored. [2] This is certainly not to suggest that women should not work outside the home, but the situation is indicative of the continuing hypocrisy of this State in regard to the double burden shouldered by so many Irish women. A large number of the part-time cleaners are also caring for elderly parents or relatives and have to rush home after working at a physically demanding job, usually from 6.30 or 7.00 in the morning, to take on more heavy labour. In Ireland, the majority of such carers are women and very few of them qualify for assistance from the state for the work which they do so willingly, despite the fact that they are saving the exchequer huge amounts of money every year. Like many other contributions made by Irish women to "the well-being of the nation", this one is undervalued and disregarded.
None of the interviewed women believed that they would be better off outside the university environment. In both catering and contract cleaning, pay was marginally less and hours were often longer. The basic rate of hourly pay for contract cleaners is £3.72 [3] while in Trinity it is £4.68. Many of the women in the cleaning area had worked for contract cleaners before coming to Trinity and all of them felt more secure in the university, even those who were on short-term contracts. They believe that, in general, the College authorities "play fairer" with them than commercial employers. In the cleaning area, in particular, there are problems with local management, but overall, the women thought that family problems and other worries would be treated more sympathetically than they would be outside the University environment. Many of them referred to the experience of cleaners in UCD, where cleaners are employed by contractors, and in the 1980s, despite the long service of some of them, when the contractor was changed by the college authorities, the women were threatened with loss of their jobs. Some anxiety was expressed by the Trinity cleaners that the College might change from the current situation, which overall they consider to be beneficial, to employing contractors, which they would see as a significantly retrograde step. This anxiety may be responsible for a certain lack of willingness to overtly protest changes in their conditions which privately they strongly resent. There are grounds for their concern as members of College management threatened to bring in contract cleaners when a claim for pro rata pension rights was lodged for part-time women workers in Trinity, the majority of whom are in the cleaning area.
There is a very strong sense of comradeship among the women, which is expressed in the frequent collections for weddings and christenings and other significant events. There is a good social network, with many of the longer-serving women going out on 'girl's nights' together. A network of information about particular problems for one of their number will lead to offers of practical help and support from other women. They are also extremely critically of each other, particularly when one of them seems to be threatening the interests of the majority, for example, in accepting an increased work load or changed hours without negotiating proper terms. Some women are described as "their own worst enemies" because they live in fear of management and do not stand up for themselves.
Many of the cleaners mention their resentment of "being treated like schoolchildren" by managers. This attitude often permeates to their supervisors, women who have been promoted but not given any supervisory training and who are themselves put under heavy pressure from management. The resentment of the supervisors seems to be two-fold: in the first place, there is a perception that one of the demands of the supervisory role, as designed by the Housekeeping Department management, involves a policy of harassment rather than actual supervision. This goes back to the 'schoolchildren' image of people who cannot be trusted to know their work and get on with it. In the second place, because the Supervisors started as Cleaners, there seems to be a feeling of betrayal, in that the women would expect them to be more understanding of the difficulties they encounter and to be encouraging of their efforts rather than critical. They feel occasional sympathy for the supervisors because the women think they are torn between pressure from their managers and solidarity with their former workmates.
The management structure in the cleaning area is reasonably clear-cut. The Lady Housekeeper, an anachronistic title which reflects the terms of a job created in the 1920s, reports to the Director of Accommodations and Catering, who is a senior administrative member of staff. Students from the College of Catering and Hotel Management are regularly employed as deputies and they have been the cause of considerable resentment by the cleaners. The women believe the students are arrogant and `look down on them'. Many of the women take considerable pride in their work and strongly resent criticism from young people whose experience of their work is limited to theory. The resentment of these students is not generic as all of the women questioned said they got on extremely well with the student body of the College.
The disparaging attitude which the women objected to in the student housekeepers is not one they have detected in members of the College staff outside their own area. In particular, the women who clean particular departments or school buildings develop good relationships with the other staff and quite a few of them were pleased to be on first name terms with senior academics and officers of the College because they felt it showed a proper respect for their work as being different in kind but of no less value. Any downgrading of their jobs which they had experienced had come from their own immediate management and their own belief that cleaning is seen as the lowest class of work, probably because it is the archetypal `women's work' and generally discounted by society. The women very often take pride in their work and are angry about dismissive attitudes. The Housekeeping Department has been cutting back on the supply of cleaning materials and the women are expected to make the same amount of polish etc. last twice as long as it used to do. There are women who bring in additional cleaning fluids and polishes from home because they are not satisfied with the poor job they see resulting from the reduced materials. Some women have done extra work for which they are not paid because they cannot bear to see the areas for which they are responsible looking badly cleaned. They believe that women everywhere take on more than is asked or expected of them in order to `get the job done'. It is obvious that management in Trinity College recognises this quality in its women workers and is very quick to take advantage of it.
The women are not complimentary about the standard of work performed by male Cleaners and they resent the fact that the small number of male Cleaners in Trinity College were employed with better conditions, with a scale equivalent to the General Operative grade in the Buildings Office and a pension. The Education Branch of SIPTU has recently lodged a claim under Equality legislation with several of the higher education institutions in which it has members. The claim is for the establishment of a incremental scale for the women Cleaners on the basis that they perform like work to the General Operatives, who do the so-called semi-skilled work in the Buildings Office. At present, women Cleaners work for a flat rate which only rises by a very small percentage each year. Residential cleaners, who work a 35-hour week, are paid £163 per week while other full-time cleaners, working 39 hours, are paid £182. The General Operative scale is not much better but at its lowest point, it is the same as the highest wage earned by the cleaners and it rises over 13 points from £182 to £195 per week. The Cleaners get no recognition for seniority or length of service. Neither do the term-workers in the catering area, where a woman can be returning every term for a number of years and still be earning the same amount as someone who has just started.
The Cleaners of student residences in Trinity have long had a tradition of caring for the students far above and beyond the call of their cleaning duties. There have been many cases over the years where the residential Cleaner was able to alert the College to a particular student's loneliness or depression and to avert what might have been a tragic situation. The women's work was enhanced by this opportunity to exercise their intelligence and intuition but even this has now been diminished as the numbers of residential Cleaners have been cut back and the women are now largely cleaning only showers and toilets and having much less contact with the students. The Cleaners have also fulfilled a security role by keeping an eye on the comings and goings in College buildings. They are amused by the extent and nature of the activity they observe from their positions as `part of the furniture'.
Both catering and cleaning workers suffer from the episodic nature of some of their contracts when it comes to claiming access to social welfare benefits or having their earnings taken into account when looking for a bank loan or a mortgage. The women are doing the jobs mainly because of economic necessity rather than the emotional need to be employed outside the home, although they enjoy the contact with other women. Many of them are doing second jobs later in the day because they do not earn enough to survive. In terms of the sort of work available to them, many of them, including unmarried women and women without children, have said they would prefer to be at home full-time but cannot afford the luxury. Their work is tough and physically demanding and many of them have reported being reduced to tears of exhaustion until they got used to it. Some of the older women, who are still in the majority, are ambivalent about the many younger women who have been employed in recent years. To some extent, they see it as a denigration of their years of experience but they also believe that the hiring policy reflects the College's desire to employ women without families and `distractions' and this reinforces their pride in their ability to cope with two demanding roles.
Because there is such competition for the decreasing number of available jobs in Dublin, many of the women in the catering and cleaning areas in Trinity College suffer continual anxiety about the security of their work. They cannot afford to lose what are good jobs in terms of the usual conditions in the marketplace. This anxiety engenders a reluctance to protest about unfair practices by their Managers and Supervisors. The majority of the women are union members but very few of them are active. Most of them simply do not have the time to take off from very busy schedules and Managers in Trinity, particularly in the catering and cleaning areas, are not known for their support of union activists and are often quite obstructive. Women in Ireland, even those without children, are still mainly responsible for routine domestic chores which require a daily input of time, such as cooking, shopping and cleaning. Another factor is their lack of involvement with the idea of themselves as workers, which is particularly true of the part-time workers. The women are working because they need the money but they see their primary function in the domestic sphere. It is significant that the age profile of female trade union activists in lower paid employment is very high - younger women see their occupations as temporary and do not recognise the need for challenging the conditions in which they work. As they get older, they recognise that their `temporary' occupations may indeed represent the only way of life.
A trade union hierarchy that is still overwhelmingly male does not seem willing to recognise that the marginalisation of women within their organisations simply reflects the gender-differentiated structure of the labour force. They should be lighting the route to fairer treatment of women workers by challenging the assumption that the solutions to their problems are by such means as job-sharing, flexi-time and part-time working, all of which perpetuate the idea that women have to combine paid work with a domestic role while men can devote themselves full-time to their role in the labour force.
Irish women have a worthy history of involvement in trade union activities which has been marked by the concern shown for working conditions, particularly in the area of pensions and health care. [4] It was women trade unionists whose action pioneered the concept of guaranteed paid holidays for workers and the rights of factory workers to have a recognised regular tea-break. In fact the 50th anniversary of the Laundry Workers strike which established the right to paid holidays was celebrated in 1995.
In Trinity College, we have some excellent Shop Stewards among the cleaning and catering workers. They are women who are articulate about the issues affecting their members and are very ready to deal with management on behalf of any of the women who are having difficulties. Some of them have been doing this work for years but it is significant that not one of them was willing to speak on a public platform about their experience as lower paid workers in a university. Despite their years of speaking up for their members and carrying on complicated negotiations on their behalf, their self-image is still coloured by their experience as women without a public role. They are prepared to make their voices heard and have done so frequently, on behalf of others, but they feel unable to be the focus of attention because they lack the confidence in themselves which comes with public recognition of the individual as a valued contributor to society.
Despite the abilities that allow many of them to perform multiple roles -often under pressures that would make the most high-powered businessman disintegrate - because of the unvalued nature of so-called `women's work' in this country, the women in the catering and cleaning areas of Trinity College are unfortunately representative of so many of the women in accepting the distorted image of themselves as unskilled and replaceable and therefore less worthy of being valued as employees.
[1] Catering Joint Labour Committee of the Labour Court, Employment Regulation Order, 31 July 1995. Part II.Return to Main Text
[2] Alpha Connelly, "The Constitution" in Gender and the Law in Ireland, Alpha Connelly (Ed.); Oak Tree Press; Dublin; 1993. pp. 4-27.Return to Main Text
[3] Contract Cleaning (City and County of Dublin) Joint Labour Committee, Employment Regulation Order, 12th July 1995, Part II.Return to Main Text
[4] Mary Daly, "Women, Work and Trade Unionism" in Women in Irish Society, The Historical Dimension, MacCurtain and ” Corr·in (Eds.); Arlen House; 1978. pp. 71-81.Return to Main Text